The slashing declamation, the violent register shifts, and the volcanic eloquence of MC throughout evoke one word: divina. And then there's her bone-chilling parting shot at 7:40: al sacro fiume io vo! Colà T’ASPEEEEETTTTTTTA l’ombra mia!

This is (btw) the 1982 DEFA film by Lothar Warneke, a brooding, incisive East German Cléo from 5 to 7, you might say, that tracks a marvelously sensitive Christine Schorn through a complex sequence of public, domestic, and clinical settings as she confronts a medical and existential crisis.

--& some alien tune like Yma Sumac's "Tumpa" or "So Long Dearie" by Carol Channing played instead then all would go haywire, the X-ray machines spewing out enough millisieverts to cause radiation sickness & hygienists attacking people w/sharp pronged instruments like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.

Go to tiny.cc/maindoc to find additional information, resources, and materials that you can download and print to distribute in your community, including posters, know your rights flyers, our own version of the red card and more.

One hopes there is more on the way; Trevisan's books deserve to have a life in English.

Jamie Richards has translated some brief stories from Trevisan's Shorts (2004) in a recent issue of the Lincoln Review. www.lincolnreview.org/issue6

But as impoverished as its vision of worker organizing may be, the novel's scathing portrait of the world of labor as a labyrinthine Tartarus of exploitation, corruption, and lies communicates a damning political message that is impossible to miss.

There are only individual grit and endurance and, for Trevisan himself, the possibility of an exit from waged labor through success as a writer.

There are fleeting feelings of solidarity and friendship with co-workers but no durable, lasting bonds. The family and the traditional succors it offers have fragmented and fallen away.

For Trevisan, writing in an age of global financialized capitalism and institutionalized precarity, such communal sources of support are absent. The tumultuous years of labor struggles in Italy, the "hot autumn" of 1969, are a distant memory.

But riven with conflict though such political confraternities may be, and as personally costly as membership in them is for the protagonist, they serve the purpose of connecting the individual to a larger community, to broader possibilities of collective flourishing.